Sunday, 10 March 2013

As
far back as I can remember, I seem to have been born for horror and
fear. Before the American bombers came, someone carried me into the
house; firewood was scattered all over the yard in the quiet sunlight.
Drops of blood glistened on the side steps where hares were butchered on
weekends. In a dusk more terrifying than black night, I stumbled, my
arms swinging ridiculously, along the edge of the woods sunk in
darkness; only the lichen on the outermost tree trunks still shimmered
faintly; from time to time I stopped still and cried out in a voice made
pathetically feeble by shame; then, when I was too horror-stricken to
feel ashamed, I bellowed into the woods from the bottom of my soul,
bellowed for someone who had gone into the woods that morning and hadn't
come out; and again the fluffy feathers of fleeing chickens lay
scattered all over the yard and the house walls in the sunlight.

This is a passage from the opening paragraph of Handke's fourth (and, I think, best) novel. The protagonist, an Austrian visiting America, is trying to get over a bad marriage. However, upon getting to the US, he discovers that his ex-wife is pursuing him. The pair make their way across America in an uneasy passage that ends up with a visit to the movie director John Ford, who offers mysterious ruminations on the cultural landscape.

Handke was born in a small town in Austria. At the age of two he was taken by his mother, a Carinthian Slovene, to live in Berlin. This was the period (1944-45) of American daylight bombing raids.

The site pictured -- the Gespensterwald, or Ghost Wood -- is located on the Baltic. It is a spooky-looking place. Who can know what has happened or might or will happen in the ominous darkness under those ghost trees?

The pictures remind me of Henry Treece:The wood is full of shining eyes,The wood is full of creeping feet,The wood is full of tiny cries:You must not go to the wood at night!

I wonder if all children are "born for horror and fear." Even my entirely benign childhood was filled with terrors -- I was convinced the old priest at our church was a vampire, that burglars stalked our house every night, and that angels would kidnap me in my sleep (that song from Hansel and Gretel about angels keeping watch was not as comforting as my mother hoped).